This post is about money. In December 2022 the Society of Authors reported on an ALCS (Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society) report under the headline ‘report on author incomes shows 60% drop in median incomes since 2006’. Here is a screenshot of the summary:
The full ALCS report is available from their website as an 86-page pdf download. It records ‘a sustained downward trend [in writers’ income] over the past two decades’. The report acknowledges the ‘lack of a stable definition of “an author”’ – a phrase I like – but was based on responses to survey questions from 60,000 writers. 51% male, 91% white, on the whole middle-aged (age group 55-64 comprising 25% of the total sample); 47% ‘primary occupation author’, 24% ‘all working time spent on writing’, and about half ‘work at least part-time in other employment’.
The Guardian also reported on the ALCS report. Its piece was a press release with quotes from salaried people in other organisations (Society of Authors, Writers’ Guild, Publishers Association) pasted in. No quotes from writers and no digging down. More recently the Guardian reported on another money issue, Baillie Gifford’s withdrawal of sponsorship funding from all literary festivals (the Hay and Edinburgh festivals had already cut free) after protests against BG’s investment in fossil fuel companies; there was much protest against the protestors; there was no mention (that I saw) of the fact that for 99% of writers the disappearance of all literary festivals would make no difference to their income.
(The Guardian’s news pages also cover literary prizes – invariably mentioning in the opening paragraph how much money the winner has bagged – and record auction prices for works of art; deaths of famous authors and artists; and scandals involving plagiarism, forgery and sexual abuse. Death, sex and money. Mostly money.)
Money shouts and literature whispers, so the conversation is always going to be difficult, but especially so in a country that has not just a capitalist economy, society, culture, but mindset. There are Premier League footballers earning £500,000 a week; there are closures and redundancies in the Humanities departments and Creative Writing courses at universities; in the private sector, there are people paying thousands for week-long writing courses on Greek islands with good food and wine. Meanwhile, the Arts Council is scatter-gun but necessary: as well as propping up the big guns (the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre, etc.), it gives cash to people without traditional privilege. It’s a Band-Aid plastered over deep political failure. The countries in Europe – two hours by Eurostar or Ryanair – that offer tax breaks to independent bookshops and restrictions on discounting by online retailers, or where the government buys copies of all new books and distributes them to libraries, seem very far away.
My tribe: writers, artists, gallerists, small-press publishers, booksellers. Not exclusively, far from it; some of the people I love have no interest in books at all. But if any of them is making more than the ALCS 2022 median income of £7,000 from their writing, painting, showing, publishing, they are rare exceptions. My point here is not to counter arguments that we are not ‘professional’ because we don’t make money (we are professional); and not to suggest that we don’t need paying because we are ‘incentivised’ by ‘love of creating’ (we also like a roof over our heads, and food); and not to claim that we are especially resilient or somehow ‘heroic’ (no). This is simply how it is, though you wouldn’t know it from how writing is reported in the news. And not from the ads for writing courses that promise to ‘take your writing to a new level’ or ‘progress your career’, with advice from ‘industry experts’.
Like most writers, like many small presses, CB editions makes a loss, every year; a sustainable loss, to date; a healthy loss, because it keeps me on my toes. CBe has never had Arts Council funding for any of its books but of course it is subsidised – by my state pension, by my bus pass, by my having picked up design and typesetting know-how in previous work so I don’t have to pay for these, by my freelance work for others, by my living in a country in which there are people who have ‘disposable income’. This isn’t news.
